Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy gets into a heated argument with the pizza parlor owner
Barstool Sports founder Davie Portnoy got into a fight with a pizzeria owner who was upset that the loudmouth mogul gave his restaurant a negative review.
Portnoy, 46, was in the middle of one of his usual pizza reviews, which he offers to his legions of Sport Brother fans online, when he was confronted by the owner of Dragon Pizza in Somerville, Massachusetts.
In a videotaped section In the video he posted for his series One Bite, Portnoy, judging food by bite, is seen walking out of the store with an eight-slice cake.
Portnoy bit into a slice of pizza and declared, “This pizza is garbage.” He gave the pizza a rating of 6.4 out of 10 and explained that the slice he ate was a “saggy mess.”
That prompted the owner of Dragon Pizza to approach Portnoy, telling him he didn’t appreciate “what you do when you walk in and judge a deal by a bite.”
“Fk you,” Portnoy said, calling him an “A-hole.”
The unknown owner then referred to the Barstrool founder as “f-ing bh”.
“Just fuck yourself and the whole damn platform you’re on,” the owner said, before threatening to call the police.
Portnoy’s “One Bite” pizza reviews have a cult following with nearly 1 million subscribers on YouTube.
“Dave went to Dragon Pizza and discovered the worst pizza shop owner in the history of reviews, and he and Dave got into an argument with him on the street,” reads the caption of the YouTube video.
Earlier this week, Portnoy announced layoffs at Barstool Sports, which he recently reacquired from Penn Entertainment for $1.
“I made myself very clear. We’ll have everyone who was paying attention layoffs and cutsand they started and it sucks,” Portnoy said on Barstool Radio.
“And people who have known me since the beginning, I hate firing people. You can be incompetent, not work, and I generally don’t fire because I hate it so much. It’s the worst thing you can do.”
“Nevertheless, we are able to take it for granted. It’s not like I have those morals – well, you can’t do it because nobody’s going to have a job. We will all have no work. So we need to return to a breakeven level. We lose a lot and it sucks.”
Portnoy founded Barstool Sports in 2003.
In 2016 he sold a majority of Barstool to The Chernin Group.
Earlier this year, Penn Entertainment completed the acquisition of Barstool for a total of $551 million.
Penn lost about $800 million at Barstool, which the company originally hoped would boost its sports betting business by affiliating with one of the most well-known brands in sports media.
Following the sale, Penn Entertainment announced it was partnering with ESPN to rebrand its existing sportsbook.
